Lord Carrington ('Small Holdings')

Spy renders Robert Wynn Carrington, 3rd Earl Carrington (1843–1928), in characteristic profile: a portly, grey-moustached gentleman in a long frock coat, silk top hat, and polished shoes, cane trailing loosely behind him. The caption 'Small Holdings' is a pointed political pun — Carrington was then President of the Board of Agriculture, steering the Small Holdings and Allotments Act of 1907, redistributing land to rural labourers. The composition's mild rotundity gently satirises the grandee reformer: a large landowning earl legislating smallness for others. The wit is purely class-political, poking at patrician self-contradiction with the measured affection Ward typically reserved for Liberal grandees.